“To each one of us, the self is the most enchanting object in all creation. Sickness intensifies the preoccupation with self. And, of course, the true bore, the classic bore, is the person who is as totally preoccupied with himself all the time as the rest of us are when we are unwell.”

Among the polychromatic titles of all John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books, The Turquoise Lament has always been one of my favorites. On re-reading, I’m not sure it’s as perfect as I remember (Travis goes to bed with two married women, that he admits to, in this story, and then there’s the question of Pidge’s age, less an issue back in the 1970s than it is now), but I certainly enjoyed it.

“Pidge” Lewellen is a girl Travis McGee has known for many years. He first met her as a young teenager, when he was working with her treasure-hunter father exploring old shipwrecks. She conceived a desperate crush on him back then, and he had to push her away a little roughly.

Now her father is dead and she’s married, and she writes him a letter. Travis flies to Honolulu to help her out. She tells him she’s afraid she’s losing her mind. She’s been seeing and hearing things that her husband, with whom she’s been voyaging in her late father’s yacht, tells her never happened. Trav knows her husband, Howie Brindle, a big, friendly, uncomplicated sort. He reassures Pidge, telling her she’s just suffering from anxiety. As they talk together, something sparks between them. She tells Trav that she doesn’t love her husband anymore. She has always loved him, and she’s going to come after him as soon as they’ve sold the boat and she’s gotten a divorce. Trav returns to Fort Lauderdale happy as an infatuated high school kid.

But later he gets another letter from her. It starts him looking into Howie’s background, and suddenly he understands that this guy is no teddy bear. He’s a sociopath, with a string of bodies in his wake. And now he’s alone on a boat with her in the south Pacific, hundreds of miles from any human contact

“Gaslighting” was not a common term back when The Turquoise Lament was written, but that’s what this story is about. It features all the standard philosophizing and educational sections explaining unfamiliar business operations that you expect from a McGee story. It was utterly fascinating all through, and poignant to boot.